Professor of folklore in the department of English at Ohio State University, where she teaches and conducts research on refugee culture, narrative in everyday life, and theories and critiques of traditionality, locality, and authenticity. She is the author of Storytelling Rights: The Uses of Oral and Written Texts among Urban Adolescents (Cambridge, 1986); Other People's Stories: Entitlement Claims and the Critique of Empathy (Champaign, Ill., 2005); and, with Carol Bohmer, Rejecting Refugees: Political Asylum in the 21st Century (London, 2008). She is the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship.
A posthumous publication, "'If They Catch Me Today, I'll Come Back Tomorrow': Young Border-Crossers' Experiences and Embodied Knowledge in the Sonora-Arizona Borderlands" by Valentina Glockner
